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Tesla’s biggest rival in China: an in-depth look at the $4,200 Wuling HongGuang Mini EV

An assembly line worker at the Wuling plant. He is putting the finishing touches on the HongGuang Mini EV here. (Credit: YouTube | Gweilo 60)

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Tesla’s biggest rival in China is the Wuling HongGuang Mini EV that starts at around $4,200. Information regarding this small but impressive electric car that is a part of an SAIC, General Motors, and Wuling joint venture is vague and usually hard to come by. However, a recent video revealed several new details about the one car that has managed to outsell Tesla for the past five months.

The HongGuang Mini EV: A Quick Introduction

First delivered in July 2020, the Wuling HongGuan Mini EV is manufactured in Lizhou, Guangxi, China, and is available in two variants: one equips a 9.2 kWh battery and the other a 13.8 kWh battery. Capable of a 62 MPH top speed and only around 75 and 110 miles of range per charge, the vehicle’s base model is available for a respectable $4,200. However, a top price of around $5,600 will give you a fully-loaded version of the car complete with air conditioning and power windows, two features that are available in most cars as a standard option. This car, however, is far from standard and is an economical EV made for short trips, tight finances, and efficiency. It’s no Tesla, but it did secure over 119,250 total sales in 2020 alone, making it the second best-selling EV in the Chinese market, trailing the Tesla Model 3.

2021 has proven to be a different story, at least so far. The HongGuang Mini EV has commanded the Chinese electric vehicle sector in 2021, selling just shy of 57,000 units through February and holding a commanding lead over the second-place Model 3, which has accumulated 27,531 total sales so far this year. The affordability of the HongGuang Mini EV is proving to be a disruptor. Although it doesn’t pack the punch or performance of the Model 3, people continue to purchase the car because of its impressive price tag.

Production of the HongGuang Mini EV

As previously mentioned, the Mini EV is produced in Lizhou, Guangxi, at a small but extremely efficient facility. A new car rolls off the line every minute, and the vehicle only takes 4 hours to produce from start to finish, according to YouTuber Gwelio 60, who recently toured the factory to have an inside look at the car.

An assembly line worker at the Wuling plant. He is putting the finishing touches on the HongGuang Mini EV here. (Credit: YouTube | Gweilo 60)

There are not many parts to the car, and it is a relatively simple machine. The battery and some other basic parts that make up a car are really the only things that go under the body and chassis itself. Anything that could be considered a “luxury” is not included in the vehicle’s most basic models. It is really a car to get from point A to point B with as few issues or bells and whistles as possible.

(Credit: YouTube | Gweilo 60)

The vehicle itself is an employee at the plant. In fact, several of them are. Wuling has several HongGuang Mini EVs that haul materials, parts, and other things across the campus of the production facility completely autonomously. The cars operate under their own guidance and can sense when to stop and when to accelerate back onto their path. Gweilo 60 showed an example of how safe they are in the video by crossing the street while a HongGuang Mini EV approached. The car successfully stopped, waited for Gweilo to cross the street, and began navigating once again.

The Interior: Simple, small, and smooth

The bells and whistles are not present in this vehicle. A small dash screen and a simple radio, along with HVAC ventilation, make up the entirety of the dashboard. It is comfortable, small, sleek, and smooth, and it is just enough to keep someone comfortable during their short drive. It isn’t much, but with the low range, it’s not like someone needs excessive entertainment or features. You get what you pay for.

(Credit: YouTube | Gweilo 60)

The ride is smooth, zippy, and comfortable, according to the short review from Gweilo. It won’t go over 62 MPH, but it’s another gas car off the road, something that is always a positive. It has good suspension, it handles well, and it is a comfortable ride for any occupants, he says.

The Bottom Line: Is the Wuling HongGuang Mini EV a real “threat” to Tesla?

No, it probably isn’t a threat to Tesla because Tesla’s cars and the Wuling HongGuang Mini EV simply are not in the same realm. Comparing the car to the Model 3 is like comparing the Model 3 to the Rivian R1T: prices, purpose, and functionality are all different, and they are two cars that shouldn’t be mentioned in the same sentence. Many Tesla enthusiasts have called the Mini EV a “golf cart” because of its size and price point, and really that isn’t far off. However, the Mini EV is undoubtedly a popular vehicle, and the sales figures show that. Is it a legitimate threat to Tesla? Probably not. At least, it doesn’t seem that way. They’re just not comparable.

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Tesla to sell zero cars in China by 2030, Morgan Stanley’s Jonas says

That isn’t to say that what Wuling has accomplished with this small but mighty EV isn’t impressive. The sales figures alone are incredible, and it is certainly a great indication that China is ready to buy EVs. However, it would be interesting to see if the Wuling-GM-SAIC partnership would be willing or would plan for a more competitive, luxurious, and expensive EV that would drive competition to the max in the Chinese market. China is becoming a hotbed for EVs, and the Wuling HongGuang Mini EV is driving EV sales through the roof.

Watch Gweilo 60’s full video regarding the Wuling HongGuang Mini EV below.

Joey has been a journalist covering electric mobility at TESLARATI since August 2019. In his spare time, Joey is playing golf, watching MMA, or cheering on any of his favorite sports teams, including the Baltimore Ravens and Orioles, Miami Heat, Washington Capitals, and Penn State Nittany Lions. You can get in touch with joey at joey@teslarati.com. He is also on X @KlenderJoey. If you're looking for great Tesla accessories, check out shop.teslarati.com

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SpaceX’s Starfall just went from secret to storefront

SpaceX now pitches Starfall missions with 1,000 kg payloads, weeks of microgravity, and Starlink connectivity.

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An artist’s illustration of a SpaceX Starfall capsule reentering Earth’s atmosphere. (Image: SpaceX)

SpaceX has put up a dedicated commercial page for Starfall, its disk shaped reentry capsule, laying out for the first time what customers actually get when they book a flight. The page, live at spacex.com/starfall, pitches “affordable, routine access to microgravity” and invites companies to get in touch about flying manufacturing, research or testing payloads.

The specs are short and specific. Each Starfall mission carries up to 1,000 kg of payload, supplies 1 kW of power and connects through an Ethernet interface. Mission length is tailored to the customer, and the payload stays online the entire time through Starlink, which means researchers can pull data from an experiment while it is still in orbit instead of waiting for splashdown.

SpaceX is launching a secret spacecraft that could change how things are made in space

SpaceX is aiming the service at three markets. Biomedical customers are told they can grow stem cell organoids, replacement tissue and layered biomaterials. Pharmaceutical companies are pitched on protein and small molecule drug crystals, which form smaller and more uniform shapes without gravity driven convection. Materials science rounds out the list, with semiconductors and other next generation materials grown in vacuum and microgravity.

The page also makes clear which rocket SpaceX is counting on. “By launching on Starship, Starfall brings a reliable and scalable cadence previously unavailable to the market,” the company wrote, contrasting weeks of continuous microgravity with the seconds offered by drop towers and parabolic flights. No price or first operational flight date is listed.

The commercial push is a sharp turn from how Starfall started. SpaceX said almost nothing about the capsule ahead of its first flight in June, and nearly everything known came from FAA and FCC filings describing a disk about 10.2 feet wide and 2.5 feet tall that can return 2,200 pounds of cargo. By its second flight on the Bandwagon-5 rideshare in October, Starfall was listed by name on the mission page, though SpaceX still did not say what it carried.

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Customers appear to be lining up. SpaceX said in its third quarter results that it signed three commercial Starfall missions during the quarter. On the earnings call, President Gwynne Shotwell described the capsule as providing “routine relatively low cost access to microgravity environments for scientific research, including improving our understanding of diseases like cancer and diabetes,” and said the three new missions would fly on Starship.

The branding effort extends past the website. SpaceX added a Starfall T-shirt to its online store on Monday as part of a batch of new merchandise, giving the program a place next to Starship, Starlink and Starshield in the company’s lineup.

The move also puts SpaceX in more direct competition with companies it launches. Varda Space Industries, which has built much of the in-space manufacturing market so far, flew its W-Series 7 capsule on the same Bandwagon-5 mission as Starfall in October. Varda’s capsules are roughly three times smaller than Starfall, and SpaceX controls the ride to orbit for both.

Starfall’s near term cadence depends on Starship. SpaceX is preparing for Flight 15 after completing static fires of Ship 42 and its Super Heavy booster in late October, and is aiming to catch both stages with the launch tower on that flight.

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Grok Bot users hit with weekly limits early, Elon Musk explains what happened

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Credit: Grok Bot

Elon Musk said weeks ago during SpaceX’s third-quarter earnings call that the company’s Grok Bot, its autonomous AI Agent platform, was showing “the fastest growth of a product” that he’d ever seen in his life.

Now, SpaceXSI is scaling back Grok Bot users’ weekly limits, much to the surprise of those who have relied on it to take away monotonous tasks in their lives.

Elon Musk’s terse November 1 reply on X captured a sharp tension in the early days of agentic AI. Responding to a user who asked for a Grok Bot usage reset after hitting 100 percent with four days still left on the weekly cycle, Musk wrote: “The cost of serving Grok Bot was unsustainably high relative to revenue.”

The post arrived amid a wave of similar complaints from paying subscribers whose meters had jumped unexpectedly toward or to the limit, sometimes overnight and with little corresponding activity. It also stood in clear contrast to statements Musk had made only days and weeks earlier.

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On the SpaceX third-quarter earnings call in mid-to-late October, Musk had described Grok Bot in almost the opposite terms. He called it “the fastest growth of a product that I’ve ever seen in my life” and said he had “never seen anything grow this fast.”

Company figures put paid weekly users at roughly 800,000 earlier in the month, more than doubling over the prior period. Daily active users had climbed from under 100,000 in early September to over 600,000 by late October.

Musk emphasized that the product has no free tier and that users appear to be getting real value beyond what they pay. In other remarks, he noted that usage per user was rising rather than declining, the opposite of the usual decay pattern for new software.

Grok Bot, launched around August, functions as an always-available agent with its own persistent cloud computer; it can schedule, research, shop, browse, and execute multi-step workflows even after the user steps away. Access is bundled into X subscription tiers (roughly $30, $100, and $200 per month) and certain Cursor plans, drawing from shared weekly usage pools whose exact sizes have not been publicly detailed.

The economics of that model are what Musk’s November 1 post put in the spotlight. Agentic systems burn far more compute than ordinary chatbot exchanges. Each task can trigger repeated model calls, tool use, web actions, and sustained background work.

When growth is as rapid as Musk celebrated, the absolute compute bill scales quickly even if average revenue per user stays fixed under flat monthly subscriptions. Industry observers noted the opportunity cost as well: the same GPUs can be rented to other AI labs at higher rates.

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A simple back-of-the-envelope comparison circulating after the post illustrated the gap: if every reported daily user paid the top tier, annualized subscription revenue would still be modest relative to the scale of compute infrastructure SpaceX is building and leasing to companies like Anthropic.

Some users also reported possible dashboard anomalies around the same period, though Musk’s framing treated the underlying cost-revenue imbalance as the core issue rather than a pure metering glitch.

The juxtaposition is the core of this exchange. Within roughly two weeks of publicly framing Grok Bot as an unprecedented success with strong unit economics and no free tier, Musk acknowledged that serving the same product had become unsustainable relative to the revenue it generates.

For the broader industry, the episode underscores a structural challenge of the agent era: demand is real and growing faster than many expected, yet the cost of fulfilling that demand through always-on, multi-step agents can outrun subscription pricing before companies can adjust limits, introduce metered billing, or raise prices.

Musk’s reply did not promise an immediate reset or higher allowances; it simply stated the constraint. In doing so, it supplied a rare, explicit public data point on the unit economics of a high-profile AI agent just as adoption numbers were still being celebrated as the fastest in Musk’s experience.

The tension between rapid, paid growth and the compute required to deliver it is now on the record.

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Tesla owners who tap Emergency Drive Away for fun are in for a surprise

Tapping Activate on Tesla’s Emergency Drive Away reportedly triggers a $539 service bill without moving.

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Tesla owners who press Activate on Emergency Drive Away may be on the hook for a service bill even if their car never leaves the Supercharger stall.

Yaro, who posts about Tesla service cases on X as @Tutrifour, said a customer called after tapping Activate while still plugged into a Supercharger. The owner was about to pull away, remembered the cable was still connected and stopped. The car never moved, but the touchscreen showed a red alert reading “Emergency Drive Away has been activated” with “Service is required” underneath. A Service Mode screenshot showed the active alert BMS_a228_EmergencyDriveAwayServiceRequired, which Yaro said only Tesla Service can clear.


The cost of clearing it was the bigger surprise. “Don’t press Activate on the new Emergency Drive Away feature on your Tesla because service charges $539 to inspect the charge port and to clear the alert. Yes, even if you didn’t move the car an inch,” Yaro wrote.  The $539 figure comes from that single case, and Tesla has not published a set price for the inspection or commented on the post. Yaro also noted that the car would still charge with the alert on screen.

Tesla launched Emergency Drive Away on October 1 with software update 2026.38.3, letting drivers pull away from a U.S. Supercharger with the cable still attached, as Teslarati reported. To use it, a driver shifts into Drive while connected, holds the brake and taps Activate. The prompt warns that driving with the cable connected will damage the vehicle and the Supercharger, and that short camera recordings will be shared with Tesla.

Tesla Charging has been clear about what follows a real activation. Repairs to a Supercharger stall can run up to $25,000 depending on the site, a service visit for the car’s charge port is mandatory, and deliberate misuse “will invoke additional penalties.” What the company had not spelled out is that the service requirement is triggered the moment Activate is pressed, not the moment the cable breaks away.

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From an engineering standpoint, that is the cautious choice. Once Activate is pressed, the car cannot be sure the charge port latch was not stressed, so flagging it for inspection removes the guesswork. It also means the button carries a price on its own, which is a stronger deterrent against casual use than any warning screen.


The report follows the feature’s first known real world use, when a driver in Austin during F1 weekend appeared to trigger it by accident and dragged the Supercharger cable along with the car. The Reddit user who filmed it said the driver seemed to have only half read the prompts.

For owners, the takeaway is to treat the red prompt as a stop sign. If it appears after shifting out of Park by mistake, shift back and unplug the normal way from the touchscreen, the Tesla app or the button on the charge handle. Activate is meant for moments when staying at the stall is the bigger risk, and Tesla is now pricing it that way.

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